Chapter 1. Introduction

PostGIS is a spatial extender for the PostgreSQL relational database
that was created by Refractions Research Inc, as a spatial
database technology research project. Refractions is a GIS and database
consulting company in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, specializing in
data integration and custom software development.

PostGIS is now a project of the OSGeo Foundation and is developed and funded by many FOSS4G Developers as well
as corporations all over the world that gain great benefit from its functionality and versatility.

The PostGIS project development group plans on supporting and
enhancing PostGIS to better support a range of important GIS functionality
in the areas of OpenGIS and SQL/MM spatial standards, advanced topological constructs (coverages,
surfaces, networks), data source for desktop user interface tools for viewing and editing
GIS data, and web-based access tools.

1.1. Project Steering Committee

The PostGIS Project Steering Committee (PSC) coordinates the general direction,
release cycles, documentation, and outreach efforts for the PostGIS project. In addition
the PSC provides general user support, accepts and approves patches from the general PostGIS community
and votes on miscellaneous issues involving PostGIS such as developer commit access, new PSC members
or significant API changes.

Mark Cave-Ayland

Coordinates bug fixing and maintenance effort, spatial index selectivity and binding, loader/dumper, and Shapefile GUI Loader, integration of new
and new function enhancements.

Regina Obe

Buildbot Maintenance, windows production and experimental builds, Documentation, alignment of
PostGIS with PostgreSQL releases, general user support on PostGIS newsgroup,
X3D support, Tiger Geocoder Support, management functions, and
smoke testing new functionality or major code changes.

Crowd funding campaigns are campaigns we run to get badly wanted features funded that can service a large number of people. Each campaign is specifically focused on a particular feature or set of features. Each sponsor chips in a small fraction of the needed funding and with enough people/organizations contributing, we have the funds to pay for the work that will help many. If you have an idea for a feature you think many others would be willing to co-fund, please post to the PostGIS newsgroup your thoughts and together we can make it happen.

PostGIS 2.0.0 was the first release we tried this strategy. We used PledgeBank and we got two successful campaigns out of it.

postgistopology - 10 plus sponsors each contributed $250 USD to build toTopoGeometry function and beef up topology support in 2.0.0. It happened.

postgis64windows - 20 someodd sponsors each contributed $100 USD to pay for the work needed to work out PostGIS 64-bit issues on windows. It happened. We now have a 64-bit release for PostGIS 2.0.1 available on PostgreSQL stack builder.

Important Support Libraries

The GEOS
geometry operations library, and the algorithmic work of Martin
Davis in making it all work, ongoing maintenance and support of
Mateusz Loskot, Sandro Santilli (strk), Paul Ramsey and others.

The GDAL
Geospatial Data Abstraction Library, by Frank Warmerdam and others is used to
power much of the raster functionality introduced in PostGIS 2.0.0. In kind, improvements needed in GDAL
to support PostGIS are contributed back to the GDAL project.

The Proj4
cartographic projection library, and the work of Gerald Evenden and
Frank Warmerdam in creating and maintaining it.

Last but not least, the PostgreSQL DBMS,
The giant that PostGIS stands on. Much of the speed and flexibility of PostGIS would not be possible without
the extensibility, great query planner, GIST index, and plethora of SQL features provided by PostgreSQL.

1.5. More Information

The latest software, documentation and news items are available
at the PostGIS web site, http://postgis.net.